We fortunately live in a time that we don’t have to ascribe to any narrative or statistic that doesn’t suit our goals or ambitions.
In our society the word “happy” isn’t synonymous with black women. We are considered strong, sassy, funky, magic, overcoming and various other descriptions that highlight our resilience, and are representations that loosely reflect our plight. This makes the black woman palpable, more or less super human, and have become character tropes assigned to black women to live by.
The dangers of these archetypes are that they are severely limiting. They leave little room to explore outside of the confines of the outlined framework and if they are explored your blackness could come into question (i.e Kamala Harris).
They can create a sense of obligation to carry the torch (i.e my mom was strong in these ways, now I also have to be) and sometimes times the torch is unhealthy or unreasonable. We often talk about what black women ought to be, but very rarely discuss what they want to be. As a result it doesn’t allow us to grow into our true design, where OUR strengths are ours to lean into and OUR weaknesses are ours to work through. It seems as if being black auto-assigns you a list of things you should anticipate to have to “overcome” or endure.
Growing up, I was often overwhelmed imagining the huge shoes I will have to fill trying to live up to the great example my mom was for me. Assuming that the way she did things meant that’s what a “real” woman” is supposed to be and do. I was also very aware of myself, and my own strengths and weaknesses and naively thought maybe God was going to impart those things that she had into me as I got older. I had to realize that I already had my own set of strengths and weaknesses that will allow me to be a great example for my own children, and they didn’t have to mirror my mom’s.
How negative messaging can affect our happiness
We are often inundated with statistics and commentary that indicate that black women are the least valued individuals in society. We are at the bottom of the societal totem pole. We are the least desired. Hell, we are even told our very own black men, that we birth, don’t even like us….
We are negatively criticized by each other and others that we are too loud, too angry, too provocative, have a chip on our shoulder, disloyal, gold diggers, hoes, bitches, aggressive, petty, not black enough, damaged, too catty, shady, arrogant, fast, too curvy, gossipy, the “most”, snakes in the grass, crabs in a barrel, funny acting, and "sometimed".
We internalize these labels to some degree, whether we manifest them into our day to day lives and interactions or make it our life’s mission to be the opposite. But whatever the result, negative opinions has had an impact on black women as a whole.
In protest and a means to cope, the counteracting narrative is that we are self-proclaimed queens, sisters, Nubian, goddesses, God’s chosen, and earth mothers. We are strong enough to overcome the narratives assigned to us when we can denounce them and choose happiness. Happiness can survive when nothing else does, it’s the one choice in life you always have.
In my opinion sometimes it seems as if society just doesn’t “want us to be happy” based on the number of paroles they continue to hurl onto our backs…. (reference: www.americanprogress.org/africanamericanwomen).
It’s highly likely we have experienced one of these scenarios: had no daddy around, had an overworked mother, were told that as a single mother you can’t raise your son to be a real man, were told there is a shortage of good black men to be fathers because they are incarcerated, might not get offered that job because our hair is too kinky, can’t have too many friends because you don’t know who you can trust, and to top it off you run risk of shorter life expectancy because of the host of life threatening diseases we are the most likely to develop or contract. All the above are reasons to be unhappy, but none of them are excuses.
I started this blog as a means to dismantle and reject the behaviors that allows for negative characteristics to thrive and take root in our narrative. While much of this rhetoric began in the days of slavery and beyond, we have quite a bit of control over it in our lives today. I believe much of the behaviors that earned us the above titles were bread out of hate, self-hate, pain, betrayal, anger, racism, fear, jealousy, etc. And while we have very little control over the ignorance of those that assigned us these descriptions, we do have governance over ourselves and our own beliefs. It gives me peace to know that the onus of my happiness is solely dependent on my choices. No matter how broken my heart is, the cards I am dealt, the people that want to exit my life, I still have a choice.
We fortunately live in a time that we don’t have to ascribe to any narrative or statistic that doesn’t suit our goals or ambitions. We have the opportunity to disrupt any cyclical trends that have handicapped our families progress and break through any glass ceilings that have been placed above us just through our mindsets.
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